How To Actually Get Into Y Combinator: Tales from a Founder
Like most founders, I’ve been trying to get into Y Combinator for years.
Their brand is so notable that some see getting in as startup success (it isn’t).
How I Started
The first time I applied to Y Combinator was in 2019.
I had an idea for a customer support outsourcing company and I believed it was a multi-million dollar opportunity — but not a billion-dollar one.
This shows how little I knew about what YC and indeed all VCs valued.
If you’re applying to YC, and you don’t believe your startup could be worth a billion dollars someday — you’ve already lost.
And in my case, months after pitching, I only got the generic “We wish you luck…but NOPE” email from them.
But getting into YC was my dream so the next year I tried again.
#BONUS CONTENT 🎁
I have the email addresses of Tech Journalists I reached out to when pitching my startups. As well as a list of Tech/Web3 VCs around the world you can apply to.
If you want the lists, enter your email and I’ll send it, plus other articles I write in my newsletter: https://forms.gle/bFjpTpwumXjMADHU 📩
Now I understood that the market had to be big enough to even get through the YC door.
By this time, I’d also read what I consider to be the most important article on Founding a Startup ever.
If you haven’t read it yet, drop everything you’re doing, find a small, quiet place, and read it now.
It’s a long read but if you’re yet to find startup success it’ll be the most important thing you do this year.
Trust me!
After reading this article, I scrapped the small SaaS idea I had and took on the most ambitious project I could imagine.
The Social App
It was just at the start of the covid pandemic and everyone was feeling the isolation.
I had an idea for a new kind of dating/social app (yes I know, another social network).
The app would match people by internet interest using data across YouTube, Reddit, and Spotify.
My thought process was that there were probably a lot of people who I could be friends with around me, but people just keep to themselves.
The app would make the process of meeting people easier by showing you people close to you who had the same interests as you.
Long story short, we built a working MVP:
To be fair, my co-founder Marvin did most of the building, while I just sat around asking if he could code faster!
I was so happy when it worked — it could link people by location and interests — we started sharing it with our friends immediately.
Prior to this, I’d already signed up for YC Startup School. They pair you with other founders and you keep each other accountable until the main program starts.
At the end of each session, we’d fill out an anonymous survey to give feedback on each other’s startups.
From the feedback I got, other founders thought we had something very interesting.
I really wish I could say things got better from here.
The app gained a few users from our immediate social group, then a few hundred, then a couple thousand.
We had publications write articles about what we were building out of Lagos, Nigeria. And that Tinder had a new competitor to watch out for.
We slowly climbed the rankings on the app stores — yeah, I wish I could say these things happened.
But what actually happened was that immediately after launch we ran into PROBLEMS.
STRIKE #1
There’s a reason why Tinder is so focused on images. I thought this was purely superficial at first, but realized it was just human psychology.
Guys on the internet, mostly want to meet girls in real life and rarely other guys. And they don’t usually care if she’s into “Twenty One Pilots” or “Kurzgesagt”.
Only that she’s hot.
STRIKE #2
Tinder already had a very similar feature — although not as extensive as ours — that showed you similar interests of people close to you.
So at best, we were building a more tricked-out Tinder.
Strike #3
People don’t invite friends, to an app where they came to meet friends. So we didn’t have an organic way to grow.
We didn’t solve the chicken or egg problem. New users came to the app, saw absolutely no one, and bounced…DUH
3 strikes and you’re OUT!
And just like that, my promising startup was a burning wreck…
But there was still hope.
If we could raise funding. We could solve the damn chicken and egg problem.
We could run marketing campaigns — and there would be more than 10 people to meet on the damn app!
Hence we looked to YC as our last savior.
But with no traction, or revenue and 3 daily active users. Even my most optimistic delusions as a founder knew YC funding was a pipe dream.
But we’d done something right.
With an ambitious idea, and good founder reviews from Startup School we had our first YC interview scheduled.
I knew we had to come up with something fast.
So we did the one everyone founder dreads — an emergency pivot.
The Crypto App
At this moment there was rioting in Nigeria, because of increasing police brutality.
The country was put in a state of emergency, people panicked and I’d never seen anything like it.
Banks were closed, police shot protesting civilians and the army killed unarmed people.
It really felt like the country was collapsing.
A few weeks before the protest I’d just learned about cryptocurrencies at the only party I’d attended in years.
I’d heard about Crypto before, but this was the first time I was high and desperate enough to actually listen.
So when banks no longer worked. My co-founder had the brilliant idea to make a new kind of p2p payment app using crypto.
Lying in the smoking ruins of multiple failed startups I was desperate enough to try anything at this point and by then I’d drunk the entire crypto kool-aid.
So we jumped in!
About a week later, Beam Pay was born!
We didn’t even bother changing names again. We were now a payment company.
I’d like to tell you that after we launched — given the state of emergency the country was in — plus the uptick in cryptocurrency prices at the time, people were begging to sign up.
I’d like to say that people were tired of the old web2 payments that blocked most Africans from international transactions. And tired of banks with apps that barely worked and all their hidden fees.
I’d like to say we walked into that YC interview with 1000's of daily active users.
I’d like to say all this.
But the truth is, Money is even more social than social media.
It was the chicken and egg problem again.
And Nigerians have very poor trust in institutions — this comes from decades of being screwed over by an uncaring government.
What actually happened, was that I spent weeks talking to small business owners about using our app for payments. I told them how crypto-backed payments were easier and more reliable than what they were used to.
But I was shouting in the wind.
They hated the banks but it was all they knew.
Weeks of leg work and blowing our non-existent runway on Twitter giveaways and we had even less interest than the social app.
The YC interview day came.
And like students who’d spent all night cramming for a big exam, we showed up with confidence backed more by optimism than reality.
We did the call and explained why we pivoted from a social app to a payment app.
We told them about the problem we were trying to solve — most Nigerians don’t have a bank account — but everyone had a phone and with our app that was all you needed to receive and send money.
We got some polite nods and they thanked us for showing up.
Call over.
Moments later I received the email that would change my life:
We hadn’t gotten in.
Here I was my third attempt at YC, after leaving my job, with nothing to show for it but rejection emails and Figma designs.
After that, I got into Web3 full-time, but that’s a story for another day. You can read about it here.
At least my years of trying taught me how to actually get into YC.
How To Get Into Y Combinator
YC is very competitive.
Thousand of startups apply each year for only a handful of slots.
I see entering the program as passing through several filters that YC uses to select startups.
Setting yourself apart from the rest isn’t easy but it is necessary.
SO DO IT.
Here’s how you enter Y Combinator:
- Have Ivy League founders: It’s easier to get into YC if you went to the same school as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And it’s not hard to see why, these schools are very selective and well-connected. So what do you do, if say — you dropped out from a University in a third-world country? You need to come super correct!
- Have growing daily active users: Overall user count doesn’t mean squat. You could’ve just imported an email list for all they know. But users coming back day after day…and they keep growing at that. You’ve got something real there. A good growth rate is a 15% increase in DAUs month over month.
- Raise money first: A bit ironic that you need money to get into a program to get more money. But YC is a business, and they have to reduce risk. If you have other investors who’ve put money into your startup and can show results with what you’ve done with it…you’re significantly ahead of 99% of startups that apply with just a cool landing page.
- Get backed by other YC founders: This sort of ties into the first one. YC has a strong alumni network. A cool way to grab their attention is to get one, preferably a couple, founders in their network to back you. These are positive signals for the YC algorithm.
With one of these, your chances of getting in are high. With a couple of them, you might as well slide into the program.
If you have none of these, like 99% of startup founders who apply…like I did back then.
You’re playing the lottery and you’ll likely lose.
These requirements aren’t just for getting into YC either. Practically every VC firm looks for these positive signals before investing.
So before you send your latest pitch deck, the one with that vision for cornering a billion-dollar market.
Think about how many of these positive signals you have.
#Bonus Content 🎁
I still have the email addresses of Tech Journalists I reached out to when pitching my startups. As well as a list of Tech/Web3 VCs around the world you can apply to.
If you want the lists, enter your email and I’ll send it, plus other articles I write in my newsletter: https://forms.gle/bFjpTpwumXjMADHU 📩
NOW GO GET IT! 🚀
